Tag Archives: law school

Aside

Only a fool would donate to his law school. Why? Because in reality, you’re often just helping your university subsidize an undergraduate’s education. A report on revenues at the University of Baltimore School of Law found that 31% of law school tuition was going back to the university-at-large. And expert Stephen Harper suggests that’s in line with the belief that 20 to 25 percent of revenues from law schools head back to the “main” university budget.

I was a GW Law grad. I have no interest in subsidizing a broader university that already squeezes $45,000 a year from its undergrads. So I’ll continue to throw away the fundraising letters.

-Michael

P.S. Looks like GW Law made the front page of the Washington Examiner this morning. Hooray.

GW Law Students Rally ‘Round Booze

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With hiring rates coming out of law school at an all-time low, and average law school tuition at an all-time high, you would think law students would have plenty to gripe about.  But if this article from George Washington University’s student newspaper is to be believed, they obviously don’t. According to The Hatchet, law student groups at GW are spending time pressing a critical issue: laxer drinking regulations on graduate students.

Yep, apparently law students want to make it easier to turn to the bottle once you get to law school. (Hmm … maybe this does have something to do with the bad legal market right now.) They complain that, under current regulations, law students have to (a) register student events where alcohol is served; (b) prohibit open bars; and (c) keep one sober person around for each 20 people gettin’ their drink on. The law student groups argue that the law school is “an adult population[,] so the kind of events that happen are more adult in nature.” (*snicker*) And moreover, “[h]appy hour is an institution in D.C.”

The idea that law students should be treated differently because they are more mature is patently false. I remember arriving at GW and being surprised at how much drinking was going on. In fact, there was probably more drinking in law school than there was at my small undergraduate school in Maine–where for many students there wasn’t anything else to do but drink. I remember carrying a classmate home from a bar review basically on my back from Georgetown because she was too drunk to walk and so drunk no cabbies were willing to pick us up. I remember another time getting a classmate–a different one–into a cab but having to stop every few blocks to let her throw up. Clearly, more than a few were still partying hard. All of this is “training” for a field that sees much higher rates of alcoholism than other industries.

The best argument that law students have going for them is that the undergraduate-oriented regulations could really screw up the character and fitness aspect of their bar applications. The argument goes that a law student could get cited for a “technical” violation (such as a bunch of club members gathering at a bar and getting cited for an unregistered club event) and face disciplinary action from the school. But here’s the deal: (a) there’s no evidence that such technical violations ever really happen, (b) more likely than not, a single drinking citation is not going to prevent an otherwise qualified graduate from being admitted to the bar, and (c) tough noogies.  Yeah, I meant that last one. A lot of practicing law involves following “technical” rules for seemingly no real reason and staying clean; law students need to get used to that early.

One law student group leader insists, “We’re adults.”  If that’s the case, maybe they should focus more of their energies on important matters (you know, adult things) and less time worrying about the alchy rules.

-Michael

The Worst Idea . . . Ever.

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The world has too many lawyers.  And too many law students.  But one law professor has decided that, numbers be damned, it should be easier for students to go to law school.  Professor Christine Hurt of the University of Illinois thus proposes one of the most absurd “solutions” I’ve heard in a very long time:  she wants to make the first year of law school free.  Professor Hurt reasons that too many students get locked into law school because of heavy debt loads, even after they decide the law is not for them.  Free 1L tuition would allow them to run free without committing financial suicide.

Great thinking, Professor.  Except, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  So, who’s going to pay for the free tryout years?  Second years and third years.  And because some students are going to drop out before they get to their second and third years (after all, that’s the point of this bizarre system), tuition will have to be raised for second and third years to account for the “lost” year of tuition for dropouts.  Even the Professor admits she’s got a problem:

“I was bouncing this idea around to a colleague who suggested that the second and third years could also be increased over $45,000 to subsidize those who took the option, but I still think the number would be small enough that this might be unnecessary (or require a very small increase).”

So, wait, the tuition increase is not going to be substantial because not many people are going to drop out of law school, even when there’s no financial cost?  So why does she feel the need to create this whole ridiculous system in the first place?!

And let’s not forget that this system would effectively punish those who are serious about the law before they make the big life choice of enrolling by creating more competition as a result of increased demand from “fluff” applicants.  Why does the professor think its a good thing that some poor kid who truly wants to be a lawyer might get bumped out during the admissions process for a slightly smarter kid with no interest in law who wants to take a cost-free one-year vacation avoiding the real world?  I’m sure that’ll create a great pool of students.

If we’re worried about dissatisfied students staying in law school because of the debt, we should be giving more lectures on the meaning of sunk costs.  (I know lawyers don’t do well with numbers, economics, and the like, but c’mon.)  More financial counseling would help address this problem without the financial calisthenics that Professor Hurt proposes.

Moreover, information on what law school is really like is already out there.  There are plenty of websites, books, and other resources that given honest perspectives on the law school experience.  Kaplan even hosts “simulated” law school classes now for prospective students.  We shouldn’t be coddling those who are too lazy or dumb to take advantage of these resources before they make a significant personal and financial investment in law school.

Lastly, I question whether we should be encouraging students to attend law school at all.  If students are truly interested in the law, let them find a way to get there.  Creating ludicrous systems like Professor Hurt’s would only strengthen the current system under which many students head to law school because there’s just nothing else they care to do.

-Michael

The Worst Law School [Website] in America

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Even if it’s not the best law school in America, the University of Silicon Valley Law School has — at the very least — the worst best law school website in America.  Just look at that eagle!  And I love the grandiose message on the alumni page:

In the course of human events and nations, virtually everything we can see, feel or hear is directly or indirectly touched by the law. It can be the skies, streams, oceans, mountains and forests, roads and bridges, music and the arts, skyscrapers or schools, computers, cars, even the air we breathe or the food we eat. Through the annals of time, the Earth has become ever more governed by the laws of man.

That really stirs my soul. 

Rock on, ASL!

Runner up may go to Appalachian School of Law, with its clipart school seal and guitar-playing 3Ls in suits.  At least there’s no mention of the food we eat.

California Southern Law School also deserves an honorable mention for its “grey, absolutely no pictures allowed” theme.  It definitely captures the soul-crushing spirit of law school well.  The school loses points, however, because the Dean says that “the study of law is a valuable quest.”  No, pirate treasure hunts are valuable quests.  Law school is a painful rite of passage ending in the student being spewed out into the world with no practical skills and an enormous debt load.  How come that’s not on the website?

-Michael

Now THAT’s a Law School Application Personal Statement

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Over at Washington City Paper, the Sexist features a feisty variant of the law school application personal statement.  I imagine that law school admissions officers read a million “I want to help the poor” essays, with just a few “I love Law and Order” stories thrown in.  One potential law school student took a much different approach, and provided a very colorful answer to the simple request, “Tell us something about yourself.”

To come out fully, in my case, requires three separate disclosures, each as potentially confusing and alienating as the last. I share them now for reasons that are political as well as personal: I am pansexual. When I say this I mean that I seek physical and emotional partnerships with people of all genders, including men, women, and transgender individuals. I am polyamorous. By this I mean that I see monogamy as one among many stable ways in which people are capable of forming romantic and familial bonds. I mean also that I find joy in my partners’ joy, including when that joy comes through companions and lovers other than myself. Lastly, I am a member of the BDSM community. When I say this I mean that I find fulfillment in consensual relationships and sensations that are not always soft and fuzzy, but can indeed be painful and challenging. Taken together, these three facts mean that I have found love and fulfillment in a wide spectrum of relationships and with a variety of people, and that this diversity of partners figures importantly into my identity.

Quite enlightening.  And it paid off with an acceptance to UC Berkeley Boalt School of Law.

-Michael

Legal Unemployment, Worldwide

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In thirty years, China has gone from having six law schools to having 634. Predictably, this is not entirely good news for the graduates of those schools, as law is now the hardest profession to find employment in:

Law has topped the list of the 10 most difficult professions to land a job in the country for two consecutive years, taking the No 1 slot in 2008 and No 2 in 2007, according to a joint study released in June 2009 by China’s Academy of Social Science and Beijing-based consulting company Mycos Institute.

However, I found this even more curious:

The other majors [that are difficult professions to find employment in] include computer science, English, international economics and trade, business administration, clinical medicine, Chinese literature, art design, electronic engineering and accounting.

To be fair, ‘Chinese literature’ and ‘art design’ might be the Chinese equivalent of an American liberal arts degree, the kind everyone derides as being not good for much in the real world. But clinical medicine? Engineering? Accounting? Business administration? These are the sort of majors that sensible, job-oriented students take that are, in the U.S., supposed to leave graduates happily having their pick of employment, while their lowly English lit classmates are waiting tables.

It suggests to me, anyway, that there is nothing particularly unique about the plight of law grads in China, but that the market for highly educated labor in general is somewhat stunted.

Still, this could very much be a hindrance to China’s long-term development.

“Law graduates have the most difficulty in job hunting, which means the supply has exceeded the demand,” Wang said.

“If there is no adjustment in place soon, it is not good for the development of law in the long run.”

Unlike the U.S. — which, I might reluctantly concede, may simply have an overabundance of lawyers in general — China has come no where near to meeting the potential demand for lawyers, but rather the legal infrastructure that would support all those theoretical legal jobs has yet to materialize. The creation of a political climate that respects the rule of law necessarily requires the presence of lawyers, however. China’s fledgling legal system is characterized more by the rule of men, but there is, at least in theory, a legal system in place. A healthy bar that continuously engage in litigation to resolve disputes may or may not eventually result in a robust Chinese legal system, but nothing else has a chance of doing so.

In other law school related news from China, U.S. law grads may eventually get some competition from China, if the Peking University’s School of Transnational Law succeeds in its plan of becoming the first non-American school to be accredited by the ABA.

-Susan

Trivia Fact: This Blog is the #1 Result for International Law Lolcats

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The past few days have seen a noticeable uptick in the number of google searches that direct to here for variations of either “law lolcats” or “alien tort statute hypos.”

Ahhh, that sounds like law school exam time, to me. Procrastination + dubious last minute study methods are a common MO.

Hint to all law students: If your prof happens to have a blog, it doesn’t hurt to give it a quick skim to get an idea of what sort of odd legal questions seem to catch their fancy, and thus are the sort of things they are drawn to basing fact patterns around. I swear to god this can actually pay off. Heck, checking Volokh can’t hurt either — I once inadvertently helped my roommate out by talking to her about a Volokh blog post on copyright and jazz music that turned up on her Copyright Law exam a few days later.

-Susan

Being A Law Professor Is Tough

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Apparently, being a law professor is no cake walk.  Two stories out today suggest that law professors have to deal with a lot of junk we don’t often hear about.

First, a former clinic director at George Mason Law is suing the school for sexual harassment.  Kyndra Rotunda, wife of constitutional law scholar Ron Rotunda, claims her clinic’s executive director harassed her during her time there, forcing her to eventually quit.  The Rotundas are now in California at Chapman Law; they announced they were “pleased to be leaving” Washington last year.

Second, a Georgetown law professor testifying before Congress today dug up some ugly stories of alleged discrimination from his time at UVa Law.  William Eskidge, Jr., who is gay, alleges that he was yelled at and potentially deferred for tenure at UVa because of his sexual orientation. 

“With clenched fists and a beet-red face, the chair of the committee threw a tantrum that included a string of accusations, such as ‘stabbing me in the back’ and behaving in the treacherous manner that he and his colleagues ought to have expected of a ‘faggot,’ ” says Eskridge in his testimony to the House Committee on Education and Labor.

Who knew law school was tough for the professors as well?

-Michael

Update: Maybe Law School DOES Need a Warning Label

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Earlier this week, I wrote about a proposed reform from Professor Anita Bernstein, wherein law schools would teach students about the perils of practicing law.  One BigLaw firm chairman thinks that’s not enough; instead, students should avoid law school altogether.  In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal [sub. req.], K&L Gates chairman Peter Kalis sharply criticized the existing law school model, and warned students about taking on all that debt:

WSJ: In addition to layoffs, law firms have dramatically cut their hiring of law school graduates. Do you think many college graduates today should think twice before they head off to law school?

Mr. Kalis: Yes. The business model of the U.S. law school doesn’t quite make sense to me. Law schools will bring you in from college and educate you, but they will encumber you with six-figure indebtedness at a tender age.

The assumption was that there was no problem, because law firms like K&L Gates would pay that off for you. And that is where the wheels are falling off.

I’ve heard that law school applications are actually increasing. We will be pouring tens of thousands of young people into a market that I suspect is not going to be able to absorb them at the remuneration levels that would have justified them taking on that debt.

Is it too late to get my money back?  Although, I suppose things could be worse: I could still be in law school.  (Sounds like things aren’t going so well for those folks.)

-Michael

Quick Hits

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• Can the greater embrace of free market principles in the United States as opposed to Europe be traced back to differences between the philosophies of the English enlightenment and the Continental enlightenment?

• It’s better to beg forgiveness than offer money: “You might think that if the apology is costless then customers would ignore it as nothing but cheap talk – which is what it is. But this research shows apologies really do influence customers’ behaviour – surprisingly, much more so than a cash sweetener.” However, I doubt these results would carry over to businesses outside of the eBay sales that this study followed. On eBay, most transactions involve no human interaction at all, but rather merely clicking a series of buttons. When things go wrong, receiving an apology from a real live person can do a lot to make you feel as if you weren’t deliberately ripped off by a computer scam, but rather were the victim of a common human screw up.

And saying sorry apparently doesn’t have any sort of magical effect if you happen to be a doctor: “Apologizing for a medical error in full and accepting responsibility may boost patients’ perceptions of physicians but may not stop them from suing[.]“

• Meet the Asgarda: a tribe of Amazons in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine.

• The rent-seeking behaviors of law schools and law professors: Law schools are notorious for their attempts to climb up the US News rankings by gaming the system — “Aside from hiring their own graduates to up the employment level, they all employ squads of people whose jobs are to create social costs (of course, most lawyers do the same thing), produce huge glossy magazines that go straight to the trash, weasel around with who is a first year student as opposed to a transfer student or a part time student, [and] select students with an eye to increasing one rating or another.”

This sort of rent seeking behavior occurs in all industries, but there’s something even more disquieting about it when all that effort is wasted pursuing the nebulous goals of legal academia. “Very little of [law school rent seeking] seems designed to produce new wealth. If fact, think of the actual welfare-producing activities that could be undertaken with the same levels of energy — smaller classes, more sections of needed courses, possibly even research into areas that are risky in terms of self promotion but could pay off big if something new or insightful were discovered or said. But this is the part that puzzles me. Whether the thief in Tullock’s case or monopolist in Posner’s, the prize is clear. What is the prize for law professors? Are these social costs expended to acquire rents that really do not exist or are only imagined? What are the rents law professors seek?”

-Susan